Daisy Cooper: At the start of this year the Government announced £50 million to create some new dentistry appointments, but that money resulted in exactly zero new appointments in my constituency. I wrote to every single dental practice in my constituency and they said that was because the funding offer was too limited in scope and time and they were given only a week to reply.
On 25 April, I wrote to the Minister asking how many appointments had been created from this money across England and where that money had gone. I have not received an answer. Will we get one today?

Gillian Keegan: Nurses play a pivotal role in social care and work hard to deliver high-quality care. Increased funding announced on 11 May for nursing in care homes will support tens of thousands of care home residents with nursing needs, including those with learning and physical disabilities, with a 11% increase in 2022-2023 and an estimated £87 million backdated for 2021-22. Our £500 million workforce reforms will provide a new fund to help nurses to meet their continued professional development objectives.

Sajid Javid: I thank my hon. Friend for her tireless campaigning on the issue, which she brought up recently in the Health and Social Care Committee. I am pleased to tell her that elective orthopaedic surgery at the Princess Royal Hospital will resume from 20 June.
My hon. Friend is right about the importance of the Messenger review. There were many examples of excellent leadership in it, but sadly there were also examples of poor leadership, including bullying and blame cultures. That is why it is essential that we have this huge reform.

Maria Caulfield: On 1 November 2018 this Government changed the law to allow the prescription of cannabis-based products for medicinal use by a specialist when clinically appropriate. Licensed cannabis-based medicines such as Sativex and Epidiolex are routinely available on the NHS.

Martyn Day: The Government have noted that Sir Robert Francis will give evidence on his work on the infected blood inquiry on 11 and 12 July, and said that they will act after hearing his evidence. What discussions has the Secretary of State had with Cabinet colleagues on the potential impact on victims’ mental health of the lengthy waiting times for compensation in relation to contaminated blood?

Edward Argar: I am grateful to my hon. Friend; he rightly alludes to the fact that he is a strong champion of his constituents and has met me on a number of occasions to argue the merits of the Thornberry health centre. As he will be aware, we now have a multi-year capital settlement for our NHS, which will allow us the opportunity, through local systems, to consider the most appropriate projects for investment.

Mark Spencer: With permission, Mr Speaker, I should like to make a short business statement about business for tomorrow.
Wednesday 15 June—Consideration of a Business of the House motion, followed by a debate on a motion on rail strikes, followed by Second Reading of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill.
Thursday’s business remains unchanged and as previously announced. I shall make the usual statement announcing further business on Thursday.

Patrick Grady: With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a personal statement in compliance with the findings of the Independent Expert Panel in its report, laid before this House today as paper HC 368.
I accept the findings of the Independent Expert Panel and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards in full and without reservation. On 20 October 2016, at an SNP social event, I made an inappropriate physical advance to a junior member of SNP group staff. My behaviour and the intent behind it was a significant breach of the behaviour code and the sexual misconduct policy for the UK Parliament. The breach was aggravated by a considerable disparity in age and authority between myself and the complainant, and further aggravated by excessive consumption of alcohol on my part.
I was wrong to make assumptions about the social and personal relationships that existed or had the potential to exist between myself and the complainant, and wrong to act on those assumptions. Blurring personal and professional boundaries in a work environment can be highly problematic, causing confusion, embarrassment, upset and distress, and I should have been aware of that. I should have been far more cognisant of the significant age gap of 17 years between myself and the complainant, and I should have been far more appreciative of the perceptions other people have of me as an elected representative and the real and perceived power that we hold.
I apologise to the complainant without reservation for my behaviour and for the distress and upset it has caused him. Since the incident in 2016, I have participated in bespoke and generic training, which has helped me to reflect more fully on my behaviour, its impact on others and the steps I must take to ensure it is not repeated. That has had a significant impact on my awareness  and understanding of my responsibility towards others, especially those who see me in a position of power or authority. It has helped me to better understand how perceptions of my status by others will have changed following my election to Parliament and how that requires different approaches on my part to professional and social environments and situations.
Mr Speaker, I am profoundly sorry for my behaviour and I deeply regret my actions and their consequences. Any breach of the behaviour code and associated policies risks bringing this House into disrepute and will cause distress and upset not just to the complainant, but to the wider parliamentary community. I give you and this House my firm assurance that I have learned significant lessons through this process, and a firm undertaking that such behaviour on my part will never happen again.
I repeat my apology without reservation to the complainant, and extend that apology to you, Mr Speaker, to this House and its staff, to the residents of Glasgow North, my constituency staff, local party members, family, friends and anyone else who has been affected by my behaviour in any way.

Stephen Kinnock: I beg to move,
That this House censures the Minister for Safe and Legal Migration, the hon. Member for Torbay, for his handling of the crisis at Her Majesty’s Passport Office; and directs him to come to the House, no later than 20 June 2022, to apologise for the tens of thousands of people who have waited more than six weeks for their passport.
I will start from the outset by saying what this debate is not about. It is not about the hard-working staff who have been so badly let down by the management and the Government. There are countless examples of the fact that the infrastructure that holds our country together is creaking—indeed, in some cases, at breaking point. There can be no doubt that the frankly shambolic state of the Passport Office is an example of the systemic failure that has been designed and delivered by successive Conservative Governments since 2010, because by the time covid hit us in early 2020, a decade of underinvestment had left us with our defences down, lacking resilience and ill prepared for an external shock such as a global pandemic. NHS waiting lists were already at record highs and there were already more than 100,000 staff vacancies. A steady stream of Conservative Chancellors had failed to grow the British economy in line with western competitors, thus depriving the Exchequer of an eyewatering £12 billion of potential income that could have helped us through the pandemic—or indeed £30 billion if the growth trajectory that was established by the last Labour Government had continued.
Manufacturing had been at best ignored and at worst actively undermined by successive Conservative Governments, with 230,000 job losses in manufacturing since 2015 alone, thus leaving our country staggeringly overdependent on China for everything from personal protective equipment to lateral flow tests, and culminating in the disgraceful spectacle of the Government wasting £8.7 billion of taxpayers’ money on PPE that did not even meet the required safety standards. A toxic Tory decade of incompetence and indifference left us in early 2020 with a high-tax, high-inflation, low-wage and low-resilience economy, so that when the pandemic struck, we were left stranded in the storm without so much as an umbrella for protection.
But the catalogue of failure that left us in the lurch when covid struck has been matched only by the litany of errors that characterised the Government’s chaotic approach to planning for the end of lockdown restrictions.

Stephen Kinnock: The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The cost of this issue is not just in broken-hearted families who were not able to go on long-planned holidays, or to go to weddings and funerals; there is a direct cost to the British economy and to productivity, and the huge cost of people having to pay through the nose for fast-track applications. The cost, when it is finally calculated, will be eyewatering.
To give a few examples of the nationwide cases, one family in County Durham had to cancel a dream holiday of a lifetime just before Easter, at a cost of £6,000, because they had been waiting 10 weeks for their six-year-old’s passport to come through. The guidance at the time of application was that it would take a maximum of three weeks.
Two parents from north Wales had been living and working overseas in France for two years and were due to return home once the father’s visa had expired, with their rent agreement ending this month. They applied for a passport for their new-born baby in mid-February but, four months on, they have still not received that passport, meaning that they have been forced to pay for a hotel at huge personal cost because they are unable to travel back to the UK.
Another set of parents in the west midlands were desperate to get their two-year-old boy, who was having medical difficulties, away on holiday. Despite applying for a passport on 2 January, poor communication from the Passport Office meant they were still waiting several months later.
In my constituency of Aberavon, one individual applied for her first adult passport on 26 February, yet had to cancel her plans to attend a wedding on 4 June. Another of my constituents applied for a passport on 23 March, yet is still waiting 12 weeks on and does not know whether they will be able to travel on 21 June. What does the Minister have to say to those families? Will he apologise to them from the Dispatch Box today?
These failures date back further than the past few months and are about not just resources, but levels of Home Office competence. One man living in east London applied for his first adult passport in September 2021.  He was told to send his old passport back. Then, after 12 weeks, he was told that the application had been cancelled. The Passport Office maintained that his old passport had never been received. The man was then advised to make another application free of charge. That application was rejected. Then, after several weeks of telephone and email exchanges, he finally received confirmation that the old passport had been received with his original application and that his original application should never have been cancelled. He was advised to make a third application, which he has done. You could not make it up.

Stephen Kinnock: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is nice to know that his friend the Minister is helping him out, but the reality is that our inboxes are groaning with issues, failure and the chaos and shambles we are seeing. Because of failure to plan from the outset, we have a bottleneck and a crisis. We hope eventually that the system will catch up, but the pain, heartbreak, missed appointments and missed weddings and funerals have already happened, and the British public cannot get them back. Those moments have passed and that is why this is too little, too late.
Thousands of people have had to wait more than 10 weeks for a passport, making a mockery of the Prime Minister’s initial claim on 25 May that almost everybody was getting their passport within four to six weeks. I am sure he will come back and correct the record, although I am not holding my breath on that. Ten weeks is of course the new target introduced by the Home Office when it failed to meet the standard, long-established Government target of just three weeks. More than 30,000 people are waiting more than six weeks and they deserve an apology from the Minister.
The performance of the Home Office simply is not good enough. Ministers are not doing their jobs and the system is simply not working. The Home Office is currently paying millions of pounds to failing outsourced contracts across the Passport Office, including a courier service that is so incompetent that it loses hundreds of passports every year. The Home Office awarded TNT, the US-owned company that is part of FedEx, a £77 million three-year contract to deliver official travel documents in 2019. It has since been criticised for missed deliveries, poor communication and long delays. Meanwhile, Teleperformance—an ironic name, we have to say—the French private company providing private call centre services, has been criticised by the Immigration Minister himself for providing a service that is, in his words, “unacceptable”.
It is therefore utterly staggering that the Prime Minister’s answer to the problems facing the Passport Office is, in his words, to “privatise the arse” off the Passport Office. Why? If the blame lies with the contractors, rather than the performance of the Ministers dealing with those contracts, how can more privatisation possibly be the answer—unless he feels that the performance of his own Ministers is so poor that he no longer trusts them? We would not disagree with that assessment, because  we firmly believe that the buck stops with Ministers and that the Home Secretary and her Ministers need to step up their leadership and recognise that they got the planning for the end of restrictions badly wrong.
There is plenty of evidence that the Home Secretary failed to plan. In April 2021, the vaccination programme was being rolled out and restrictions were lifting, but Passport Office numbers decreased by 5%. This year’s increases are too little, too late; they should have been in the pipeline since last year, as experts were warning of delays throughout the pandemic. Interestingly, Ministers refused to directly answer my recent written question about how many calls the Home Office had had with Teleperformance contractors and TNT to plan ahead in the run-up to lockdown restrictions being lifted. Perhaps the Minister can provide a fuller account of those discussions today, if any took place.
The PCS says that the Home Office originally estimated that 1,700 new staff members would be needed to deal with the backlog but, as far as we know, only around 500 have been recruited, many of whom are agency staff without the full training. Agency staff inevitably cost the taxpayer more money, which is a clear case of how the failure to plan is putting yet more strain on the public finances.
It is not just staffing levels that have caused the problem. It was staggering to learn recently that the new digital application processing system for passports was supposed to be fully implemented three years ago, but staff are still using the older, clunkier application management system. The Home Office will reportedly be paying penalties for failing to implement the new system, but it is unclear what those penalties will amount to. The new DAP system would increase the speed of passport processing, so this is a major error that is again costing British holidaymakers and other travellers dear. To make other things worse, at this time of backlog Britain, the Prime Minister’s second not-so-bright idea is to cut 91,000 civil servants, whom we desperately need to put everything they have into reducing delays and cutting waiting lists.
I have some specific questions for the Minister. What specific steps is the Home Secretary taking to improve the performance of the Passport Office, Teleperformance and TNT? By what date does the Minister expect all passports to be delivered within the 10-week window? How many of the staff brought into the Passport Office are agency staff? What training has been given to agency staff brought in to deal with the surge? Is that training fit for purpose?
Why is the Passport Office still using the legacy AMS? When was AMS originally planned to have been replaced by DAP? Are there any penalty costs for still using the legacy AMS? If so, what are those penalty costs and who will they be paid to? What is the timeline and final implementation date for DAP to be fully functional, and what is the end date for AMS? How many staff are currently engaged in working on the development programme of DAP? How many people were engaged in working on the development programme of DAP on 31 March 2020, 31 March 2021 and 31 March 2022? Why have there been delays in fully deploying DAP and is there a plan to recruit further people to develop and facilitate that? I ask again: how many meetings did the Minister have with the contractors throughout 2021 in preparation for international travel reopening, and what was discussed at those meetings?
The Home Office is simply not fit for purpose under this Home Secretary. The Department has already been placed in special measures twice, with the Ministry of Defence taking over Border Force operations in the channel and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities managing the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Unless the Home Secretary ups her game, the Passport Office may be taken off her hands as well. More immediately, we need the Minister to apologise to all those people who did what was asked of them throughout the pandemic, worked hard and earned their trips abroad, only to have their hopes dashed and their nerves shredded.
From NHS waiting lists to our courts, from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to passports, from chaos at our airports and lorry queues at Dover to our broken asylum system, everywhere we look, our country is bogged down in delays and chaos. The year is 2022 and this is backlog Britain. Let us hope that the Minister will do the decent thing today and apologise, and then let us hope that the Government will at least start trying to get their act together, because the British people deserve better than this.

Richard Thomson: That was quite an interesting listen, I have to say, certainly from the SNP Front Bench. I am struck by the Minister being magnanimous enough to say he feels sorry for those on the Labour Front Bench. Clearly, he feels very sorry for himself with all the criticisms that have come his way, but what I have not heard is a single word of apology or contrition for those who are stuck in the backlog. After that quite extraordinary performance, people are entitled, especially those languishing in that backlog, to feel a growing sense of anger at the incompetence and insouciance of this Government.
To be clear, my censure today is reserved entirely for the ministerial team that has presided over this situation. It is in no way a criticism of staff, who have been doing their utmost in the most difficult of circumstances over the last few years to ensure that processes work as effectively as they can. While the volume of applications is perhaps unprecedented, Ministers cannot, with a shred of credibility, claim that it was in any way unexpected. In fact, at times in recent weeks it has seemed that the Government have been determined not just to restrict the number of people able to come into the country, but to do their level best to prevent people from getting out of the country lawfully, too. Their lack of humility and contrition will rightly enrage those in the backlog. After how many attempts was it—two or three?—the Minister was still unable to say how large that backlog is. He did not even say “pass” or use a lifeline to phone a friend. That is absolutely telling and damning in equal measure.
The 10-week target that the Home Office speaks of is routinely being missed. The Home Office has had access to passport data, including the number of passports set to expire, all the way through the pandemic and was therefore fully aware, or at least ought to have been, of the spike in applications that was likely to come as soon as restrictions on travel were lifted. Ministers did not have to be Mystic Meg looking into a crystal ball to see  what was happening. HM Passport Office is currently advising travellers to allow up to 10 weeks for applications to be processed, up from an average of three weeks before the pandemic. We are hearing of delays of up to five months or even more for applications to be processed. With few or no fast-track appointments available anywhere across the UK due to them being fully booked, travellers are being forced to cancel travel bookings, often losing hundreds of pounds of their hard-earned money in the process.
As ever, we can point to the statistics, but it is the human stories that really get to the nub of the issue. I was made aware, in preparing for this debate, of a case where grandparents had bought a holiday for their grandson as a gift for his 18th birthday, not realising he did not have a passport. It is now touch and go whether he will be able to take up that gift. A case from my own office is of a family looking to return to Scotland from the United States of America. Their inability to get passports for their children is not only risking their ability to travel in accordance with their plans, but preventing them from enrolling their children in school. This is not just about holidaymakers and tourism. For many, having that travel document as a simple form of ID is vital for business, family or practical reasons, or simply for accessing crucial public services.
For many, the failure of the system to process applications timeously and to issue passports will mean yet more forced separations from family and loved ones, after two years of the pandemic and the restrictions we have all been living under. People are again being deprived of the opportunity to say that one final goodbye to those they love, and their nearest and dearest. Business deals and contracts will be lost if meetings cannot take place face to face, where they need to be concluded in person. The Government also need to look at the issues around lost or stolen passport cases, which currently seem to sit outside all escalation processes. It seems that HM Passport Office is dealing with the escalation as if the only thing that matters is the travel date. In many cases, people will need passports faster than any travel date, simply to get visas from other jurisdictions in order to travel.
It is not as if the Government were not forewarned. As early as July 2020, as the first lockdown eased, the issue of passport backlogs was raised with HM Passport Office. Back then the official response was that staff were
“working hard to ensure that anyone with pre-planned travel does not miss out if their passport application has been submitted correctly and in good time”.
However, there have been many, many issues that a simple, bland public relations assurance cannot paper over. We heard from the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) about the issues with staffing. The lack of staff is clearly the major factor that has contributed to the backlog. The question then becomes: why did the Government not ensure enough people were employed to process the upsurge, in line with usual service standards?
Back in 2021, the Public and Commercial Services Union was promised that there would be an additional 1,700 staff recruited to deal with the predicted increase in applications, but the Home Office struggled to recruit for the reasons we have heard, in part due to the low wages on offer, and we have seen only about 500 additional recruits since then, most of whom have been agency staff. I believe there are currently over 1,000 full-time equivalent agency staff in HM Passport Office alone,  meaning the workforce is between one third and one quarter agency staff. But this is not just about a simple failure to recruit. It is also, due to the conditions, about a failure to retain. Back in April 2016, the number of full-time equivalent paid staff was sitting at just over 3,913. At the time of the pandemic in April 2020, that figure had reduced to 3,585. By March this year, it was down to 3,232. Clearly there is a staffing crisis not just of recruitment, but of retention. It is impossible not to lay the blame with the culture that comes from the top—here.
There are also issues with systems. As we have heard, there have been delays in the full roll-out of the digital application processing system, which the PCS union understood was by now to have taken over from the application management system. The delay is clearly adding to backlogs and complexities, as an understaffed office is having to run two systems. I seek clarity from the Minister. What is the exact timescale for the roll-out of the DAP system? Will he explain why the AMS continues to be used, why there have been delays in fully deploying the DAP system, and why further staff are not being recruited to the project as a matter of urgency to help facilitate deployment and process applications to the expected timescales?
Then, of course, there is a wider problem that affects the Government’s attitude to public services: the fragmentation of the service. The Prime Minister said recently that if things did not improve, he would consider privatising the Passport Office, seemingly oblivious to the fact that many of its performance issues can be attributed directly to the impact of the privatisations and part-privatisations that have already taken place. As one Passport Office worker said:
“It shows an absolute ignorance to the actual problems. When we look at the issues in HM Passport Office at the minute, a lot of it is the privatised areas.”
The Government have serious questions to answer about their choice of private providers, particularly their choice of courier, given customers’ experience of the service when their passports are finally issued. The Government’s own data, which tracks the performance of the most valuable contracts with private companies, shows seven companies not reaching their agreed targets, six rated as inadequate and a further one requiring improvement.
Teleperformance, which has a five-year contract of nearly £23 million with the Government, been accused of giving customers “poor, misleading advice.” Members across the House will be only too aware of the pressures their own constituency staff are now under, as they are put on hold for hours, trying to get through to someone who can assist our constituents. I do not intend to delve into the issues surrounding TNT, other than to say that that situation clearly should not have been allowed to grow and fester as it did.
The PCS union has sought assurances from HMPO management, including a commitment to work with PCS on workforce planning to properly staff HMPO to cope with the applications without the need for regular overtime. The union has also called for a reduction in the use of contingent labour, and has sought assurances that the Government will work to increase remuneration levels across HMPO and increase the pace of negotiations around allowances for members working in customers service areas. It has sought the provision of a clear timeline for the implementation of digital application  processing, as well as a commitment that no further HMPO work will be privatised or outsourced, and a guarantee that contracts that are currently outsourced will be considered for urgent insourcing. Those all seem perfectly reasonable asks as we try to get through the morass that has been created.
The union sent a letter to the deputy director of customer service operations on 12 May, outlining those issues for clarification and seeking assurances. I stand to be corrected, but I believe that I am right in saying that a response has yet to be received. That is disappointing.
Brexit and the Prime Minister’s leadership woes have clearly chewed up considerable political energies and bandwidth that could have been deployed better in getting on with the day job of government over the last few years. It is easy to laugh at the Government’s puerile obsession with the symbolism of being able to issue blue Brexit passports. Quite frankly, I would not care if my passport was bright yellow with pink polka-dots if it arrived on time to allow me to get on with what I was doing.
The Home Office clearly does not have its troubles to seek. There has been a continued and conspicuous failure of political leadership over many years, with a steady procession of Home Secretaries who seem to be more interested in throwing red meat to the Back Benchers and playing to the culture wars gallery than trying to get to grips with the day-to-day issues that should concern them. We have seen it in the tragedy of Windrush, the botched handling of the Afghan and Ukrainian refugee crises, the plans to intercept boats in the channel on jet skis, the callousness of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the looming omnishambles of the Rwanda deportations. We have consistently been shown that despite the Home Secretary’s bellicose, tough rhetoric from the Dispatch Box, the record is simply one of incompetence and failure—quite frankly, enough is enough.
Too many individuals, families and businesses have been left in limbo by this fiasco; too many have had their plans suspended, upended or overturned; too many have been left unable to demonstrate to authorities who they are for the lack of identification documents, whether they want to travel to access public services or simply to access employment to provide for themselves and their loved ones. The Government need urgently to get a grip.

Nick Smith: The Government are letting down thousands of families across our country. The Passport Office is in chaos because record applications are not being processed in good time. The Home Office was warned about this last year but has failed to take sufficient action. Indeed, its own key indicators last autumn showed that a storm was brewing. I have been frustrated by Ministers ducking and diving and not admitting the scale of the problem. I have submitted a dozen parliamentary written questions about this, but I have had poor responses on the size of the backlog, on the metrics that are being used and on when the service will return to normal. The only figure available was a leak to the press suggesting a 500,000 backlog.
This problem is causing havoc to people’s plans. My office is hearing from worried constituents every day. One case is a seven-year-old constituent who has a family holiday to Australia next week. Their application was submitted on 16 March. It took six weeks for the Passport Office to request information, which was sent back straight away, and tomorrow marks 13 weeks since they first applied. The family needs the passport in order to apply for a visa, so these delays are risking their family holiday.
This is being made worse by the clunky system that the Passport Office is still using. An upgrade was planned three years ago, but it still has not happened. A new digital system would reduce processing time and cost less, so this needs to be done urgently. In the Minister’s closing remarks, can he please tell us when this will happen? Yes, more staff have been hired and more applications are being processed, but still the applications pour in and the delays continue. Families are having to resort to fast-track applications just to get their passports back in time, but at double the cost.
We must have a realistic action plan to get the service back to normal by the middle of July, ahead of the summer holidays. I think the Passport Office needs to tag-team with the National Audit Office to better understand the problem. It must improve its process management and we must have much, much better reporting to Parliament. We are all afraid that the problem will get even worse as the summer holidays approach. Ministers must grip this now, before family holiday plans are turned to sand.

Florence Eshalomi: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
“I have now applied twice to renew his passport at £55 on both occasions plus new photos and am really at a loss. I have spoken to close to 30 different people at the Passport agency over the past six months, all of whom share my frustration and then do absolutely nothing about it.”
Those are the words of my constituent, Tom, who is trying to renew the passport of his six-year-old son, Frederick. Tom originally applied for the passport in October last year, sending in the forms and the old passport, before the application lapsed due to an administrative error on his part. Tom then attempted to apply again on 17 January but was told he needed to send the old passport in again, despite its being in the possession of the renewals team. Tom does not have the old passport. Despite explaining the situation more than15 times over the phone, by email and in letters, Tom’s application was cancelled for a second time. Nearly six months later, guess what, Tom still does not have a passport for his son Frederick. My office has received conflicting advice from the Home Office about the status of this passport, and we have struggled to receive updates in a timely manner, regularly chasing the Home Office.
This is just one of a dozen cases brought to my attention by my Vauxhall constituents over the past few months regarding the unacceptable delays from the Passport Office. These delays mean that people are missing much-needed holidays after the covid pandemic. They mean that people are unable to see family members they have not seen for two and a half years. They mean that people are unable to attend life-changing events such as weddings or saying goodbye to their loved ones. These delays are unacceptable.
Tom’s story, and the many other stories that we will hear this afternoon from right across this House, show clearly that the Home Office is in disarray. Things cannot and must not carry on like this. Sadly, this highlights yet another example of failure on this Home Secretary’s watch, and it is leaving households right across the country suffering. People in Vauxhall and across the country deserve better, and the Minister must act urgently to sort out the delays and deliver a passport system that is fit for purpose. I highlighted to him in an intervention an email I had received while we were sitting in the Chamber, and I hope that he will help me to look into that if I email it to him later. When he responds to the debate, he needs to outline what tangible action he will be taking to address these delays before we see a massive increase in this backlog come the summer.

Alison Thewliss: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This passport chaos is, to borrow the phrase used recently by one Minister, “absolutely godawful”. The scale of the delay really is quite worrying. Ministers may not know the extent of the problem, or perhaps they just want to keep it to themselves rather than admit to the scale of the crisis. I have a lot of sympathy for Passport Office staff, many of whom are based at Milton Street in my constituency. I know they are doing the best they can in the circumstances; it is Ministers and lack of investment in the service that are letting them down.
Nothing the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), said gives any comfort to the people who are queuing in  a panic outside the Passport Office in my constituency, or waiting by their letterbox day after day for passports that have yet to arrive. One constituent, Scott, experienced significant delays: he made his application on 25 January and his passport was finally delivered on 9 April—to the wrong address. He has yet to receive a response to his complaint about this. It is a serious data breach if passports are indeed being delivered to the wrong person, as other Members have highlighted.
These delays and lack of response are not uncommon. Even I, as a constituency MP, am still waiting for responses to cases that I or my office raised in April, so I do not have an awful lot of confidence in the system. As I mentioned in an intervention, my constituent, Henry, has some issues with TNT, which failed to deliver his passport on three occasions; it got sent back to Peterborough. As of Sunday, he was still waiting for his passport. It is hugely frustrating to know that he could have had his passport had TNT not messed up the delivery.
My constituent Jennifer contacted me on 28 May and said:
“I am writing to you as I have a real dilemma trying to get my daughter her first adult passport. I have been trying for days to get a fast-track appointment, but no chance. I have literally sat for days refreshing the website on the off chance that I will get an appointment, even setting my alarm for midnight to try—no chance. I have a flight to Poland on 4 July. My daughter is going to see her dad whom she has not seen in three years. This is devastating for her.”
I contacted Jennifer today and she emailed me to say that the passport application has been approved, but that there is still no sign of the actual passport. She says that she has called several times. She has been put on hold, been passed about and been cut off. It is an absolute shambles. I have yet to have a response to the complaints that my office has put in on this case and on many others. Those complaints are still coming in.
I spoke to taxi driver Martin on Monday morning on my way to the Chamber. He will lose thousands of pounds if the passport for his child does not arrive within the next week or so. I urge the Minister to consider the fact that Scottish schools break up for the summer holidays next week, so there is a real and pressing case to prioritise passport applications for people in Scotland and in other parts of the UK who may go off on holiday a little earlier. Many of those families have already rebooked because of covid. They have had lots of delays, and any further delay could mean families losing thousands and thousands of pounds.
My constituent, Lisa, has documented in great detail the lack of response that she has had from the Home Office and the stress that it has caused. Her son’s first passport arrived on 10 June, but she had applied for passports for her whole family on 1 March. The other members of the family got their passports, but there was nothing for her son. The family could hardly go on holiday, leaving one member of the family behind. That is just not practical—I am sure that Ministers would not want them to so in any event.
It is incredibly distressing for families to go through this stress, not knowing whether a passport will arrive, not knowing whether they should cancel their holiday on the off chance that it does not arrive or whether they should wait in the hope that it arrives just in time. There is really no reassurance for the waiting families.
My constituent Wafa was in touch with me. A glitch in the system at the Home Office meant that their application was not processed. My constituent, despite many attempts to get in touch to resolve this issue, has only just got an appointment with the Home Office to get their passport application under way. There is no recognition from the Passport Office that this delay was its fault. It was the fault not of my constituent but of a glitch in the system that my constituent attempted on many occasions to resolve. They do not yet know whether they will get their passport in time to travel. That is just not fair.
All of this backlog is not exclusive to the Passport Office part of the Home Office. I see significant delays in other areas of the Home Office, week in, week out. I have the case of a husband who is not able to be here for the birth of his first child, because his paperwork has been delayed by the Home Office. It is a relatively simple visa case, but my constituent may not be able to be present for the birth of their first child. If the Home Office does not get its finger out, the mother will give birth on her own without the support of her husband.
There is a lot of talk from the Government about the cost of the immigration system and the cost of keeping people in inexpensive hotels and temporary accommodation. That is entirely due to the Home Office’s own incompetence and delays. The costs are significant and people are left waiting indefinitely with only an impersonal standard response from Ministers, if, indeed, they get a response at all.
What is the response to all of this? It is a yet more expensive plan—a white elephant—of sending people to Rwanda through state-sponsored deportations and state-sponsored trafficking.
This is nothing that my constituents in Scotland have voted for. When we have a passport system of our own—I hope that that day will come very soon—we will look at Westminster and say, “Good grief, we cannot do any worse than this mob.”

Mohammad Yasin: Passport delays are causing immense stress to my constituents. This problem was predictable, but the Government completely failed to plan properly for the surge in applications when borders reopened. The Prime Minister will not admit that there is a problem and cannot even say how long it is taking for passports to be processed. It seems to be an unlucky dip of four, six or 10 weeks, but far too many of my constituents are waiting even longer than that.
A mother wrote to me a month ago to ask for my help on her son’s passport after receiving no response from the Passport Office. After weeks of chasing the new passport, she was advised that HMPO had lost her documents and that they would need to apply and pay for a lost passport and start the process again. After more weeks of waiting, my constituent chased the Passport Office again only to discover that it had entered the  wrong details on the system. My constituent was exasperated when the call handler thought it was funny—the date of birth that they had entered would have made my constituent 600 years old. The HMPO advised that it would fast-track the application, but that did not happen.
My team had to travel to Parliament to raise a number of cases with action teams in Portcullis House, but the flaw in that system—other than the inconvenience and expense of my caseworkers having to travel to Parliament to escalate cases—is that the MP engagement team do not appear to have a full overview of all actions that have been taken on a case, including any notes added by the Portcullis House team. That means that caseworkers are unable to follow up on any action that the Portcullis House team has committed to without travelling to London again. I hope the Minister will look at fixing that. Despite the best efforts of my team, my constituent had to cancel the flights that she had booked to pick up a family member’s ashes and was absolutely devastated to miss the memorial service. She finally received her son’s passport on 7 June—nearly 13 weeks after the application. My constituents should not have to deal with the stress and incompetence of a service for which they pay the Government a lot of money.
Missing significant family occasions during the pandemic was tragic but understandable. It really is disgraceful that it is still happening because of a failed passport system. The Government are desperate to point the finger at civil servants. The Passport Office has not covered itself in glory, but there is much more going on here. The Government want us to believe that a hitherto hard-working group of individuals have suddenly and for no apparent reason decided to stop doing their jobs properly. Nothing seems to be working under this Government, whether it is getting a GP appointment, a visa, access to courts, a dental appointment, or a driving licence. Nothing is working properly. If the public are sick of the appalling delays and errors with HMPO, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is now just waiting for the Prime Minister to cut its staff by a reported 90,000.
The common denominator in all these failings is this Government’s mismanagement, underachievement and incompetence. I have no confidence that any of this will be sorted out before the summer holiday rush starts. This is where the impact of this Government’s policies will be revealed for all to see, as there will be chaotic delays, queues and frustrations at passport control and customs. The Government should sort it out now.

Holly Lynch: Like every other MP who has spoken in the debate and, I suspect, every other MP across the Benches, I have an inbox and postbag full of Passport Office delays. We opened 30 cases last month, as the target for passport processing has slid to 10 weeks.
To share some further examples from my Halifax constituency, we have been working with a family who made an application on 17 March for the renewal of a child’s passport for a holiday on 30 May. We chased multiple times and escalated the case as the holiday got closer. The passport was finally processed and arrived the day before their holiday. However, the Passport Office made a spelling mistake in the child’s name, despite its having been spelled correctly by his parents on all the forms. It took that family more than 10 weeks to get the passport, and when it arrived it was wrong. They had no choice but to cancel their family holiday.
Another family applied for the passports of both their son and daughter to be renewed at the same time, with exactly the same information provided for both, other than their names, dates of birth and genders. Remarkably, the son’s application was processed immediately and arrived two weeks later. The daughter’s, however, is still ongoing, with the Passport Office continuing to raise new issues with it. First it queried the mother’s parental responsibility; then it said the referee who had countersigned the passport was not eligible to do so. Those may well be legitimate queries, but the information being questioned was exactly the same information provided for her brother’s passport, which was processed in two weeks. We are in a position where the process cannot be right, which prompts the question: why the inconsistency? Where is the oversight?
A third family applied for their daughter’s passport six weeks before she turned 16. They sought advice, given that if someone is within three weeks of turning 16 they are advised to apply for an adult passport. However, the Passport Office advised them to still apply for a child’s passport. Unsurprisingly, they have now been told she needs to apply for an adult passport and the family need to start the application process again, with their family holiday now imminent and hanging in the balance.
We have heard too many such cases in the Chamber today. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) spoke of exhausted staff of Her Majesty’s Passport Office having to witness threats of self-harm from a member of the public who was desperate for a passport. I thank her for her dedication and for being such a powerful advocate for those staff today.
My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) told heartbreaking stories of lost holidays that his constituents had shared with him. My hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) told the story of her constituent Tom, who has endured various problems, setbacks and issues in applying for a passport for his six-year-old son. My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) highlighted the challenges in just getting access to the data that we would all so like to see, including the answer to the big question—the size of the backlog.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), who is a brilliant champion of her constituents, spoke of the local campaign she was involved with to retain her local passport office, working alongside the PCS union. She also spoke powerfully, as others have done, of the impact on children in particular of not knowing whether their family holidays will go ahead as planned, or will ultimately have to be cancelled at very short notice.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), who spoke of this not being the only crisis in the Home Office. I am afraid the crisis in political leadership and its lack of compassion is making for an agonising time for anyone who needs Home Office services. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Kate Hollern) spoke of a family who had to pay £1,000 to change the date of their holiday.
My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) reminded us that there are so many different reasons why people need to travel, and told some particularly heartbreaking stories. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) spoke of his constituents who had been unable to attend the funerals of loved ones—an utterly heartbreaking position to be in.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) again spoke of people’s missing family funerals and significant family events, not for public health reasons, but for admin reasons, which has had a devastating impact on his constituents. My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) spoke of the Prime Minister’s claim that everybody is getting their passports within six weeks—an utter nonsense, when we have all shared constituency stories from our caseloads. Last but by no means least, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) spoke about the predictability of the surge in demand and asked why we were not prepared for it.

That the draft Goods Vehicles (Licensing of Operators) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2022, which were laid before this House on 11 May, be approved.—(Amanda Solloway.)
Question agreed to.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),

That the draft Terrorism Act 2000 (Code of Practice for Examining Officers and Review Officers) Order 2022, which was laid before this House on 11 May, be approved.—(Amanda Solloway.)
Question agreed to.

Liam Fox: I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady, who makes a very good point, which augments what I was saying. Housing is being built in Bedminster, for example. Where are people going to go to work? We need high-income, good-quality jobs. The businesses we have in Portishead—the spin-offs from avionics, for example—provide those kinds of jobs. The problem is: how do we get people in those areas of high unemployment and where the new housing is going to be built to where the jobs are? The danger at the moment is that not only are we unable to do that, but companies are unable to grow because of the restrictions on labour availability, they move to somewhere else and we lose the wealth from our region.
As ever, it all comes down to money. In 2017, the scheme budget was set at £116 million, assuming a line opening date of December 2021 and excluding a new requirement to fund operational costs. Following three separate Department for Transport-directed delays to the development consent order approval—one of which we debated here only last November—the pandemic, and unprecedented inflationary and market pressures, the revised forecast at completion was £210 million in December 2021. Following cost mitigations amounting to £47 million, the latest forecast sits at £163 million. After further increased regional budget contributions, that leaves a funding gap of £26.82 million, comprising £15.58 million in capital and £11.24 million in revenue, which we have requested the DFT to cover.
Just in case anyone has forgotten our debate in November, I remind them that I said then:
“A six-month delay, as suggested by the Secretary of State’s office, would have a potentially devastating impact. It is important that we understand whether this six-month figure was simply plucked out of the air and whether a shorter delay would deal with any reservations from the Department.”
That mattered a great deal to us. I also said:
“It has been assessed that the impact on cost beyond 14 January 2022 will be in the order of an additional £13 million at minimum”.—[Official Report, 26 November 2021; Vol. 704, c. 653.]
I warned in November that the extra six-month delay for what I believe was an unjustified environmental assessment, or other similar delay, would put pressure on the partners in the project, who simply would not be able to find extra money of that order.
What am I asking the Minister for tonight? First, I am seeking agreement to an additional £15.58 million—that is the capital funding provision. Secondly, I am asking for agreement to implement the previously proposed governance structure, with the DFT taking on the client role. If that is not agreeable, incidentally, the funding gap increases by another £14 million. Thirdly, I am asking for agreement to work with North Somerset Council and the West of England Combined Authority to find a solution to fund the forecast additional MetroWest 1 operating subsidy cost of £11.24 million, recognising that North Somerset Council, a small unitary authority, and WECA have no funding streams for additional revenue.
The Minister recently indicated that there would be no more money in the Department, but the latest ministerial position ignores key cost drivers that have arisen in the interim period, since 2017, which are largely outside the control of the project team. Those include unbudgeted operational costs; requirements and inflationary costs, linked to associated programme delays, arising from the  Department’s development consent order—that adds £28 million; DFT-led changes to the project procurement strategy, which add £6.1 million; market price increases, which are outside the control of the Government and add £39.5 million; and of course the pandemic, which adds an estimated £4.8 million.
Those numbers are tiny when we are talking about projects such as HS2. Let me remind my hon. Friend the Minister about the benefits that the project will bring that fall within the full aims of Government policy. It will significantly reduce travel time from Bristol to Portishead to 23 minutes, compared with 60 minutes-plus—on a good day—by bus and an optimistic 50 minutes-plus by car, and greatly improve people’s access to employment and services, as I outlined. It will bring more than 50,000 people in Portishead and Pill into the direct catchment area of a railway station for the first time in more than 60 years.
Regeneration of our railways has been a key aim of the Government. This project will deliver 1.2 million additional rail journeys and £7 million of revenue within 15 years of opening. It will produce benefits to the regional economy of £43 million gross value added per annum. It will remove 13 million car kilometres annually by 2041. It will bring new employment opportunities regionally and bring the benefits of economic growth to Portishead and wider North Somerset. There will be sustained environmental benefits, and the major improvement in travel to work times will bring associated personal quality of life and community benefits. What is not to like about this project?
One more push from my hon. Friend the Minister and her colleagues and we can get this project across the line. What could give our region a better boost in this time of uncertainty than to put all the worries behind us, once and for all? I look to my hon. Friend for the push.

Wendy Morton: I hear my hon. Friend’s comments and recognise that the project runs beyond the boundaries of the North Somerset constituency.
The proposal is now part of MetroWest, a third-party metropolitan rail programme promoted by West of England Combined Authority and North Somerset Council. The Government have already committed funding  support of £31.9 million to close the funding gap for the project to reopen the Portishead line to passengers, and a further request from the joint promoters for £15.6 million of additional funding was recently received. I assure my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset that the case is being carefully considered by the Government. The Department will continue to work closely with WECA, NSC and Network Rail counterparts on the approval process for the scheme’s full business case.
I want it to be clear that I fully recognise that the scheme is of great importance to my right hon. Friend’s constituents and to the wider Greater Bristol area. The congestion on the A369 between Bristol and Portishead, with journey times of about an hour in peak periods, is a barrier to travel. Reintroducing a rail connection would bring the communities of Portishead and Bristol closer together, improving work opportunities for local residents and for leisure and tourism. It would also bring people closer to the rest of the country.
The funding is subject to the granting of a development consent order, which is a statutory requirement, and a satisfactory full business case. The full business case will also need to progress through my Department’s rail network enhancement pipeline approval process, a framework by which all publicly funded rail enhancements are considered.
My right hon. Friend will be aware that, with regard to the scheme’s development consent order, the Secretary of State issued a “minded to approve” decision on the 19 April. This sets out that the Secretary of State is minded to make the order, subject to receiving further information and evidence regarding the costs and funding of the project, with the reasons for that set out in the letter. The Secretary of State has requested that this information be provided by 30 November. To allow sufficient time for this information to be provided and for the Secretary of State to consider it, the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), issued a written ministerial statement on 19 April extending the deadline for the DCO application to 19 February 2023. Should satisfactory information be provided ahead of November, the Secretary of State will look to issue a final decision on the DCO application as soon as possible and ahead of the February 2023 deadline.
It is important to note that I am not involved in the decision on this application, but I am sure my right hon. Friend will understand that this is still a live application under consideration in my Department. I am therefore unable to take part in any discussion on the pros and cons of the development consent order itself, to ensure that the process is correctly followed and remains fair to all parties.
I must also stress that the development consent order process is a statutory requirement under the Planning Act 2008. The process for considering an application must follow the legislative requirements, and the Secretary of State can request any further information that he considers necessary to allow him to undertake this consideration and to fulfil his statutory duties.
More broadly, with regard to the Government’s commitment to rail schemes, we have committed to levelling up the country, and reconnecting communities to the railway is central to that ambition.

Wendy Morton: I appreciate what my right hon. Friend is saying, but obviously there is a process that I and the Department must go through.
When it comes to the Government’s commitment to rail, I gently remind colleagues in the Chamber that, as part of our levelling-up agenda, in January 2020 the Government pledged £500 million for the restoring your railway programme, to deliver on our manifesto commitment to start reopening lines and stations. That investment is about reconnecting communities across the country, regenerating local economies and improving access to jobs, homes and education.
We reopened the Dartmoor line in November last year, restoring passenger services between Exeter and Okehampton for the first time in 50 years. That has been a great success, with passenger journeys double the anticipated level. In May this year the service frequency on the Dartmoor line was doubled so that passengers now have an hourly service. That followed further infrastructure work that has delivered an improved journey time of around 35 minutes between Okehampton and Exeter St David’s. The line opened two years ahead of schedule and significantly under its approved budget.
The Government also announced, in January 2021, £34 million of funding to progress plans to reopen the Northumberland line to passenger services between Ashington and Newcastle, with six new stations and a service of two trains an hour by the end of 2023. I gently say to the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) that those are some strong examples of this Government’s commitment to investing in the railways.
The Government also recognise the importance of the Greater Bristol area as one of the UK’s most productive and fastest growing city regions, which is why we continue to make significant investments there. For example, on Friday 10 June funding of £95 million for phase 1 of the Bristol Temple quarter regeneration programme was announced. That investment will transform access to Bristol Temple Meads station, delivering new and improved station entrances to the north, south and east, with related transport interchange and active travel provision. The new entrances will make it much easier to reach the station from the city centre and surrounding neighbourhoods, and the eastern entrance will connect to the Temple quarter—one of the largest urban regeneration sites in Europe and soon to be home to the University of Bristol’s enterprise campus.
That project will complement wider investment in the regional and national rail network already being made, and the Temple Meads station upgrade will unlock transport to south Wales and the south-west of England, significantly increasing passenger capacity and improving connectivity between Bristol, Cardiff and London. This work is complemented by the recent refurbishment work at Bristol Temple Meads station, which will provide better passenger facilities and improved accessibility.
The Government also invested £132 million in the remodelling of the railway in the Temple Meads area, which was the largest enhancement project on the Great Western route in 2021. That work will mean more regular and reliable trains with more seats coming through the station. The new railway layout is also a key enabler of the MetroWest scheme, which is allowing new local services that improve connectivity between Bristol and its neighbouring communities, enabling people across the south-west and south Wales to benefit. A new parkway station at Portway on the MetroWest line towards Severn Beach, which received £1.7 million of backing from my Department’s new stations fund, is also being built. The station will serve both the adjacent park-and-ride site and local residents, and is expected to open in December this year.
To conclude, the Government are committed to improving rail in the wider Bristol area as part of the levelling up of the west of England. I listened carefully to what my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset set out this evening, and we will continue to support the West of England Combined Authority and North Somerset Council to develop their business case for the reopening of the railway between Bristol and Portishead. We fully acknowledge and appreciate the importance of this project to his constituency.
Question put and agreed to.
House adjourned.